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Cover Photo

Kauile dos Santos, 7, son of the Brazilian actor and circus performer Paulo Cesar Oliveira dos Santos, practicing some moves that might one day get him into the big top.Credit
Stephanie Sinclair for The New York Times

Running Away With the Circus

Just for the sake of argument, consider the Ringling Brothers Circus of the year 1890, roughly 17 years before it became the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. That year, you could see Anzo, the Human Serpent, slither on the ground. You could see the La Role brothers, Chris and Harry, the two ‘‘Flying Men of the Air,’’ and the wondrous Nellie on her airborne trapeze. You could see Edward Billings, the King of the High Stilts, as he confounded audience members with his height and balance, and watch the ‘‘educated’’ horses ridden two at a time by one man. You could see Barretta, the Boneless Wonder, whom, years before, a young Winston Churchill had begged in vain to see. (According to Boris Johnson’s biography, ‘‘The Churchill Factor,’’ his parents decided the sight would be ‘‘too demoralizing and revolting’’ for a child.)

All this is to say that the Ringling Brothers Circus of 1890 was a mindblower. And yet its most popular feature that year was not its freaks or its flying-trapeze artists. It was not even the Boneless Wonder. No, the standout attraction was the incandescent light bulb.

Thomas Edison had just invented it, and when the circus came to town, folks flocked to the special exhibit to see what they could only assume had been a rumor — an orb that could emit bright light without any fire at all. They were admitted into a dark room, where they sat and waited. Then suddenly, light flooded all around them, and they were astonished. Over the course of several minutes, the light was switched on and off several times, before the audience finally staggered out and went home and told their friends. Those friends came the next day, paying their pennies and nickels to sit in amazement as well.

There are light bulbs at the circus today, but they are used to illuminate the things that are most popular now: the trained animals, the women shooting out of a cannon through the air, the men balancing on high wires. Nobody would pay to see a light bulb anymore.

‘‘That’s my point,’’ said Kenneth Feld, the chairman and C.E.O. of Feld Entertainment, which has owned the circus almost continuously since 1967. ‘‘The circus changes. It was a big deal, and then it wasn’t.’’

We were sitting beneath a painting of a sad clown in his office at Feld Entertainment’s 90,000-square-foot production headquarters in Ellenton, Fla. Feld Entertainment was started by his father, Irvin; today, Kenneth, 66, runs it with his three daughters, Nicole, Alana and Juliette, all in their 30s. Earlier this year, they decided together that by 2018, Ringling Brothers would take its elephants off the road and retire them to the family’s vast preserve in Florida, where the Felds say the animals will breed and take part in research for everything from fertility to cancer. (They like to say that what they learn from their elephants will help the animals in the wild.) They all agreed that it was time to relent, time to let go.

It wasn’t that they were quite willing to agree with animal activists, who for years have argued that the circus’s elephant-training methods, which involve bullhooks and tasers, are draconian. Instead, the Felds were yielding to reality: More and more municipalities, places like Los Angeles and Oakland, have banned the use of these training devices, presenting a logistical nightmare. What do you do with the elephants after they’ve performed in Phoenix and the circus is heading to Los Angeles? You can’t keep them on the trains. You can’t have them idle in the backyard of the Staples Center.

The decision was devastating, but Kenneth was philosophical. ‘‘The circus has changed over the years,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s no other entertainment that’s been around for this long that you could name. We’re older than baseball. We’re older than Coca-Cola.’’ He continued: ‘‘I don’t know how many times it’s been reimagined, reinvented, but I know we’ve probably done it six, eight times. We’re going to do it again without the elephants in a whole different way. Then we’re going to do it again and we’re going to do it again and we’re going to do it again.’’

The circus is no longer the Felds’ most popular business. They’ve acquired many other live entertainment shows, like motor sports and “Disney Live!” But they see themselves as the stewards of an important legacy, and the circus remains the inspiration for everything they do. Now, though, the Felds don’t merely have to adapt to the changing times; they have to adapt to a time that is particularly inhospitable to the idea of a circus in the first place. In a culture of cheap, ubiquitous hand-held entertainment that doesn’t require arena parking, they have to convince the world that the circus still matters.

While the Felds are at work in meeting after meeting, trying to figure out how to create a circus so good that we won’t notice the absence of the elephants, the 65 elephant workers who train and look after the animals are getting ready to take what could be their final laps across the country. Some will move to Florida, because the elephants will need to be cared for by people who know what they’re doing.

Photo

Alexander Lacey, a “big cats” trainer and presenter, walks his leopard, Mogli, back to the pen after practice at the arena in Fairfax, Va.Credit
Stephanie Sinclair for The New York Times

‘‘The train is like a city on wheels,” said Stephanie Sinclair, who spent 11 days photographing the ‘‘blue unit’’ — one of two units, each a completely different show, that travel the country each year. Everyone on the train knows one another, but the various sets of performers don’t mingle much. They practice so often and so rigorously that when the train is in motion — the average distance between cities is 350 miles — they shut down: They sleep, they watch TV, they read. The train stops only to refill the water stock and, occasionally, for the animals to stretch out on longer trips; whenever it does stop, the performers immediately begin rehearsing again.

There are more than 300 people in the blue unit, representing 25 different countries and speaking everything from Russian to Arabic to Guarani. A few travel in cars and trailers, but a majority, 270, live on the trains. Only about 100 of them are actual performers; the rest are support staff like trainers, teachers, animal minders, carpenters. (One of the show’s publicists lives on the train, too.) Most come from multigeneration circus families, to the extent that collectively, the circus staff represents thousands of years of circus history. They spend 44 weeks of the year traveling an average of 20,000 miles from coast to coast on a train that is 61 cars — a full mile — long. In total, the train comprises four animal stock cars, 32 living coaches, two concession storage cars, 19 equipment cars, a generator car, a shop car, an auxiliary shop car and, of course, the pie car, which is the train’s diner, open whenever the train is moving.

The men and women of the circus all say that only circus people like them can understand the lifestyle. Adrielle, who rides a motorcycle in the Globe of Steel, is a fifth-generation circus performer from Brazil. Some of the Chinese acrobats have been doing trapeze work since they were 4. (They have their own chef, a condition of their contracts.) Milcidas Jimenez, who sells cotton candy, has been with the circus for 28 years. His 19-year-old daughter also sells food, and his wife does face-painting. His two little ones, who are 4 and 5, are in the nursery school.

The circus workers shared stories with Sinclair about their children being born on the road. Sandor Eke, who is the boss clown, almost missed the birth of his son, now 14 months. Sandor himself was born into the circus in Hungary. He says that his son will be ‘‘a dentist, a lawyer, a professional athlete, a millionaire.’’ But of course he’s joking; about his son, he said, ‘‘He’s already starting to juggle.’’ That’s what happens when you’re born into the circus.

Joey Frisco Jr. is the blue unit’s lead elephant trainer. He’s third-generation circus — his grandfather ran away to join it. Joey met his wife on the train: She was a dancer, but now that they have five children, she’s focused on them and the elephants; she rode one of the animals in a show I attended.

Photo

Victor Rossi, a clown who began his career in France, waiting to begin the preshow performances.Credit
Stephanie Sinclair for The New York Times

‘‘Who doesn’t want to retire to Florida?’’ Frisco said with a big smile during the preshow in New Orleans. We were talking about the elephants’ retirement, and his family’s move. His father would also work at the Florida preserve. When I suggested that this was maybe a happy decision, he said he was a circus person; all the elephant people are. You can rarely see an Asian elephant at the zoo anymore, and when you do, it’s far away. Now where would people be able to see the elephants? Now where would he get the joy of seeing people’s eyes light up when they were close enough to touch the beasts?

So you’re sad, I said to him. He looked down at the ground, and when he looked up, his smile was gone. ‘‘Everyone is sad,’’ he said.

It is an amazing thing to see someone fly through the air, but it’s harder to convey that fact to people who believe they are watching people fly through the air on-screen all the time. You can’t convince children who watch shows with talking animals that it is an incredible thing just to see an elephant play ball with another elephant, or to see a tiger simply not eat his trainer.

It’s getting harder to convince adults, too. Somehow, over the past few decades, we’ve forgotten how to be impressed by physical achievements, incredible feats that no normal person can do. We have forgotten how to prize an act in which a performer risks his life gracefully — to understand that it is both the risk and the grace that make it something truly astonishing. Nowadays, you go to Times Square, and you don’t see people juggling and eating fire and doing delightful busking; you see people in superhero and Elmo costumes doing nothing but existing off versions of something that appears in movies, on TVs and in toy stores. That’s the commercial reality that the Felds have diversified into via their other live shows, like Marvel Universe Live! and Disney on Ice.

The circus is the last bulwark against all that. Which is why the Felds are driven to demonstrate, once again, what is magical and singular about it. Maybe they don’t have their new light bulb yet, but they already have a lot to work with. At the circus, you can see Gemma be shot out of a cannon, which almost always makes children stop eating their popcorn and turn to their parents to ask if they really just saw what they think they saw. You can see clowns, the needy, needy clowns, who look you in the eye to make sure you registered every single strange thing that just happened — a dance, a pratfall, a misunderstanding with the other clowns. You can see ecstatic women drop from the ceiling in Plexiglas globes that just dangle there, and Paulo, who descends on a rope, only to ascend back up with a jetpack. You can watch a league of Chinese men in unitards juggle fire, and a group of women dressed in gold minidresses who ride golden bicycles in artful formation. You can see all these breathtaking feats that — even in a culture that’s all about constant distraction these days — are hard to look away from.

And here’s something else I saw: After the trapeze act was over at a show in Newark, a 10-year-old girl next to me began to sob. When her parents asked her why she was crying, she looked up and shook her head hopelessly and said she couldn’t say.

Stephanie Sinclair is a photographer who has a traveling exhibition called “Too Young to Wed.” She runs a nonprofit group of the same name with the goal of ending child marriage worldwide.